Tale of two cities

Recent conferences in two very different places illustrated the range of challenges being faced by cities these days. At the 1st international Conference on Age-Friendly Cities, co-sponsored by the World Health Organization, the International Federation on Ageing, and Ireland's Age Friendly County Programme, in Dublin last month, the focus was on how urban planning and urban design can best accommodate an aging population - and that includes a great many of us fairly soon, in terms of the 75 million aging baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 in the U.S. alone. Many of the themes reflected sound city-building practices generally - mixed-use, transit-accessible, walkable environments. Some cities are already boasting about being "age-friendly" - "When I retire, I want to move to Manchester," read one promotional banner. Yet there were deeper questions about the changing character and stability of cities. In several countries in Europe, notably Italy and Ireland, the "replacement rate" in population dynamics has tapered off, with dwindling numbers of younger people in the workforce, in proportion to those retired. As a result, something has been added to the toolbox for many mayors of large cities: the "youth dependency ratio," a calculation of this lopsidedness and how it figures into municipal finance.
     Dollars and cents, meanwhile, were very much on the minds of the municipal officials gathered at the League of California Cities. Amid the vendors touting permeable paving surfaces, LED streetlights, and solar-powered trash compactors, were companies specializing in labor negotiations for increasingly tough contract talks and layoffs, and one consulting group that helps cities and towns pass local tax-increase measures, to pay for schools or keeping police on the streets. California is considered the leading edge of states and local governments grappling with the ongoing fiscal crisis.
     Earlier this year, lawmakers tried to deal with a $10 billion budget deficit with a package including some fee increases for car registration and fighting forest fires. But California is an exceptional place for other reasons. It is home to Proposition 13, the property tax assessment limit that Ronald Reagan predicted would catch on like "prairie fire." But as Chris Palmieri at Business Week recently wrote, such property tax caps have wreaked fiscal havoc. Meanwhile, California continues to lead the way on climate, including a focus on land use planning. Trying to do something about global warming in a tough economy make the West Coast an important place to watch.

Foreword thinking

    The best approach in a national framework for accomodating population increases is to plan for where people live -- not where they don't, writes senior fellow Armando Carbonell in the foreword of Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America's Metropolitan Geography, recently published by APA Planners Press. Co-authors Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang, both longtime friends of the Lincoln Institute, seek to remake urban and regional planning theory, says Carbonell, with a spatial planning approach somewhat similar to Europe's, at least in terms of the relationships between major metropolitan areas, also known as megaregions. That concept grew out of a studio at the University of Pennsylvania led by Carbonell, Robert Yaro, and Jonathan Bartlett, ultimately leading to the formation of America 2050. In Megapolitan America, Lang and Nelson look at similar clusters of about 20 megapolitan areas -- networks of metropolitan centers fused by common economic, physical, social, and cultural traits. They argue for long-range planning that sheds outdated images -- the notion of America as the land of wide open spaces -- and stokes the nation's economic engines. 
    Meanwhile, former Arizona governor and Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt and Washington environmental attorney Douglas P. Wheeler, both Lincoln Institute board members, reflect on land conservation and open space in the foreword to Southern California Coastal Mountains to the Sea, a celebration of 50,000 acres preserved at historic Irvine Ranch, one of the largest urban open space areas in the U.S., with some three million people living nearby.

In the steps of Kingsbury Browne

    Audrey C. Rust, president emeritus of the Peninsula Open Space Trust based in Palo Alto, Calif., was named the Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, at the annual Land Trust Alliance Rally held this year in Milwaukee. Rust, who was executive director and then president of the Bay Area land trust from 1987 to this year, was also named the winner of the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award by the Land Trust Alliance in recognition of outstanding leadership, innovation and creativity in land conservation.
     Previous Kingsbury Browne fellows Jay Espy, executive director of the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, and Jamie Williams, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Northern Rockies Initiative, joined fellow James Levitt for an open dialogue about land conservation issues, at the conference. Other winners have been Laurie A. Wayburn, co-founder of the Pacific Forest Trust; Mark Ackelson, president of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation; and Darby Bradley, president of the Vermont Land Trust.
   Under Rust, the Peninsula Open Space Trust partnered with public agencies and private landowners to protect more than 53,000 acres of open space lands in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. The achievements ranged from Cowell Ranch, 1,200 acres of coastal bluff and agricultural soils just south of the city of Half Moon Bay, Calif.; 20,000 acres on the San Mateo Coast; and 1,623-acre Bair Island, one of the South Bay’s largest restorable wetlands, now part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Rust received the Times Mirror-Chevron National Conservationist of the Year Award and the Jacqueline Kennedy Award from JFK University for her achievements in land conservation, among other awards. She lives in Menlo Park, Calif. She is an avid gardener, draws and paints, and takes every opportunity she can to hike on lands she helped protect.
   The fellowship is named for Kingsbury Browne, the Boston attorney and Lincoln Institute fellow who first envisioned a network of land conservation trusts, and convened conservation leaders here that ultimately led to the formation of the national Land Trust Exchange -- later renamed the Land Trust Alliance -- in 1982.  Browne is considered the father of America’s modern land trust movement, a network of land trusts operating in every state of the nation and totalling more than 37 million acres.

High-speed rail response

Our latest Policy Focus Report, High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for U.S. Policy Makers, continues to prompt a healthy dialogue about whether and how to invest in inter-city infrastructure in these difficult times. Co-authors Petra Todorovich, Dan Schned and Rob Lane all took the Acela up from New York for the Sept. 26 launch event at Atlantic Wharf, one block from South Station -- the kind of transit-oriented development the report cites as keys to success for stations. Japan started things rolling with the first bullet train in 1964, and Europe and China have followed -- the latter with a four-hour trip from Beijing to Shanghai, about the distance between New York and Chicago. The U.S. could sharpen its planning focus now, Todorovich said, by concentrating on markets with the best chance of success, such as the Northeast Corridor and California. The event was covered by Boston Globe transportation reporter Eric Moskowitz, who filed this story, as did Nate Berg at Atlantic Cities. The report was picked up by numerous blogs including extensive comments, at California High Speed Rail Blog, High Speed Trains, OnBoard and others. We wrote our own take in a Citiwire column, at EnoBrief, and in a guest blog post at The Infrastructurist. A short video of Todorovich talking about high-speed rail and the international experience will soon be posted at our videos page.

Encore for Vancouver

VANCOUVER -- In the U.S., the model of sustainability, urbanism, density, and transit is Portland, Ore., the subject of our documentary film on the struggles of citybuilding. But the real mecca is a few hundred miles to the north, across the Canadian border -- the cluster of gleaming towers on the Pacific, Vancouver. What started as a sawmill and railroad town now attracts urban planners from all over the world, to witness how the city has been able to encourage density, provide urban amenities including extensive parks and running and biking trails, set aside highways and build a first class transit system for a metropolitan area of some 2.3 million people.
    Yet as in Portland, Vancouver continues some soul-searching -- and wonders what should come next, based on comments in a three-day field trip organized by the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Granville Island, the Olympic Village, the towers and urban grocery stores of Coal Harbour all suggest a playground for the rich -- a "pied-a-terre on the way to Whistler," as one local developer put it, amid "Spandex urbanism," in the words of another planner. (This is a reference to the way to seawall paths to Stanley Park favor the impossibly fit and trim). The Canadians put a lot more into affordable, or what they call social housing than most communities in the U.S., but still the contrast is stark, with the heroin-shooting denizens of Downtown Eastside. Will the jobs all be in services? There are reportedly more people working at VYR, the airport, then in all of the timber industry. The city could also become a commercial center for tar sands extraction, tarnishing its green credentials.
    What the future holds may be exemplified in the 1,000-person-per-month population growth and how it's being managed -- virtually all of it south of False Creek. The real action is in the wealthy Asian immigrant community of Richmond -- where the Asian malls include Lamborghini showrooms -- and south of the Fraser River in the booming suburb of Surrey. These areas have lots of Vancouver-calibre density, showcased by the Bing Thom-designed Simon Fraser University at the Surrey Centre station -- classic transit-oriented development. The driverless TransLink subway trains ply 43 miles of track and stop at 47 stations, and both maintenance and expansion are financed by a gas tax (as well as a version of a value capture mechanism via the property tax). For the livable city, it seems, transportation is destiny.

The next housing bubble

       The burst housing bubble of 2008 -- traumatic marker of the end of the Bush presidency, trigger of the Great Recession -- won't soon be forgotten. Some have called for the so-called mortgage cram-down bill to help the millions of homeowners underwater and threatened by foreclosure. Just today, President Obama called for changes to make it easier to refinance federally backed loans.  Fixing the housing market is viewed as a gateway to recovery; still others maintain housing and homeownership shouldn't remain at the center of the economy, while rentals are much in demand.
       Throughout all this dialogue, an important empirical question remains: is it possible to see bubbles growing to the breaking point -- and by implication, do something about it? James R. Follain and Seth H. Giertz, co-authors of A Look at US House Price Bubbles from 1980-2010 and the Role of Local Market Conditions, a Lincoln Institute working paper, investigated the relationship between housing prices and several explanatory variables for a large panel of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, to gain insight into the likelihood that price bubbles are present. They will present on their findings in the second installment of the Lincoln Institute's fall lecture series, Boom and Bust: A Look at Housing Bubbles 1980-2010, November 2 at noon at Lincoln House.
      By using the Monte Carlo method, the authors were able to project house price (and employment) distributions for each MSA, allowing a test of the role of local market conditions in the formation of price bubbles. The variation in projected house price appreciation appears to be driven by differences in local market conditions, which include growth rates in real house prices, employment, real income per capita, and a variety of fixed effects. Their analysis underscores the complexity of forecasting bubbles -- and the difficulties of doing so in a framework based on the notion of a national housing market. As any real estate agent might say, housing markets are pretty local.
     James R. Follain, a senior fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute for Local Government, is an economist with extensive academic and other professional experience in the empirical analysis of housing and mortgage markets and public policies that affect them. Seth H. Giertz is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and served at the Congressional Budget Office’s tax division, and the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.

The Urban Gauge

        The development process has a regional context, but specific proposals are typically buffeted by very local concerns, if not outright NIMBYism. That was the basic challenge faced down by George Thrush, dean of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University, who went on to develop the Urban Gauge, a flexible, web-based software tool designed to inform and engage multiple stakeholders in urban planning decision-making processes, in real time. The idea starts with transportation planning, and will be refined and field-tested with community groups and advocacy organizations. The ultimate goal is an integrated planning tool capable of cross- referencing planning inputs and outcomes for a range of stakeholder concerns: transportation with energy use, housing cost, job growth, urban form, and access to services. The hope is that the Urban Gauge, with a dashboard allowing users to score projects against local and regional criteria at the same time, can greatly increase the transparency of the public approvals process, dramatically reducing the time necessary to evaluate projects.
       George Thrush, whose research, practice, writing, and teaching all revolve around contemporary urban issues in architecture, and the connections among transportation, urban design, and civic image in an increasingly privatized economic arena, will kick off the fall lecture series at the Lincoln Institute October 11, 2011. He is co-author of a comprehensive regional transportation and development proposal for the Boston metropolitan area called The New Urban Ring, and writes a blog for Boston Magazine.  The lecture is free and open to the public but registration is required.

Ingram on infrastructure

    Lincoln Institute president Gregory K. Ingram weighs in on infrastructure in the Report from the President in the October issue of Land Lines:
    Infrastructure (comprising energy, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, and sanitation) plays an important role in urban land development, and it influences city and country productivity. Data on the amount of infrastructure stocks at the national (but, alas, not the metropolitan) level are available for many developing and high-income countries and support several results summarized here. 
    The amount of infrastructure stocks per capita across countries is strongly related to per capita income levels—when country incomes double, infrastructure stocks nearly double as well. However, country infrastructure stocks have essentially no association with a country’s level of urbanization once country income is taken into account. This seems surprising because cities have large amounts of infrastructure. But they also have dense populations that use the infrastructure intensively, so per capita urban infrastructure stocks are similar to national levels.
    The composition of infrastructure stocks also varies systematically with per capita income. Roads have the largest share of infrastructure stocks in the lowest income countries, with water systems second and electric power systems a close third. As country incomes increase, the infrastructure related to electric power systems increases more rapidly than income levels. Infrastructure for water and sewer systems increases less rapidly, and for roads the change is in proportion to income. As a result, in high-income countries electric power systems are the largest component of infrastructure, followed by roads, whereas water, sanitation, and telephone systems comprise only a modest share of their infrastructure. 
    Based on recent rates of economic growth, and using the existing relations between infrastructure and per capita income, developing countries are likely to need to spend about 5 percent of their GDP on infrastructure (3 percent for expansion and 2 percent for maintenance)—currently about $750 billion annually—to maintain existing ratios between infrastructure and GDP. For high-income countries, total spending would be lower, at 1.7 percent of GDP (about evenly divided between investment and maintenance)—currently about $700 billion annually. Countries growing faster than average need to invest a higher share of their GDP so that infrastructure stocks can keep up with economic growth.
    In some countries, improving the efficiency of service production from existing infrastructure is an alternative to new investment. For example, average electricity losses across countries range as high as 25 percent, and leakage and unbilled water can exceed 30 percent. Reducing such high losses can forestall the need for additional capacity. Somewhat surprisingly, performance within countries across sectors varies greatly—efficient performance by a country in one infrastructure sector is uncorrelated with performance in other sectors.
    What sources will provide these investment funds, particularly for developing countries? Foreign assistance and development bank financing of infrastructure in developing countries currently total about $40 billion annually, and that figure has more than tripled since 1990 in current dollars. Private investment in infrastructure in developing countries has recently reached $160 billion annually and has grown eight-fold since 1990, also in current dollars. Foreign assistance is directed mainly at energy, transport, and water and sanitation systems, with virtually no funding for telecommunications. In contrast, more than half of private funding goes to telecommunications (particularly mobile telephony), followed by energy. Telecommunications and energy draw more private investment in developing countries because their tariff revenues cover a large share of operating costs, whereas tariff revenues and user fees cover a much smaller share of costs for transport and water and sanitation. Private investment in infrastructure was concentrated in Latin America and East Asia in the 1990s but has spread more evenly across global regions in the 2000s.
    Despite the growth in international funding, large and growing metropolitan areas in developing countries still need to raise significant sums to finance infrastructure investments. This will involve raising tariffs charged to users, increasing taxes (particularly property taxes) on properties whose value is enhanced by infrastructure investments, and establishing municipal bond markets such as the one being developed in South Africa.